Match-day medical operations

Match day is when injury management stops being a desk job. The Matches section of the Medical portal keeps you oriented across the weekend: every fixture in the round, the squads and their availability, and the live match while it's being tracked — so injuries you assess at the ground go onto the injury board the same day, not reconstructed on Monday.

This article walks through the round view, the per-match view, and how match-day injuries flow onto the board. The clinical detail of concussion / HIA assessments and the GRTP framework live in their own articles — Concussion and HIA and Graduated Return to Play.

• Where it lives
• Pre-match availability check
• On the day
• Getting match-day injuries onto the board
• A note on documentation

In the Medical portal sidebar: Matches. You'll see two levels:

• Round view — every match for the club in the chosen round, side by side, with kick-off times and venues.
• Single match — the medical staff view of one fixture: the lineup, the live score and events while the match is in progress, and the post-match summary afterwards.

The round view is the natural starting point on a Saturday or Sunday morning — it tells you where you're needed and when.

Open the round view a day or two before match day. Each fixture shows its squad, and each player carries their current availability — an Active injury shows as Unavailable, a Modified Return shows its restrictions. If you've reassessed someone since the lineup was set, make the change from the injury board (the match view is read-only for medical staff); the coach sees the updated availability on their lineup immediately.

While the coach or team manager tracks the match live, the single-match view shows the same live picture they have — the clock, the score, and events as they're logged. Medical staff don't log events into the match itself; your record of an on-field assessment is a triage note or an injury, created from the Medical portal as soon as you've assessed the player.

For a suspected concussion, create the injury with the concussion flag — Clubhouse calculates the minimum stand-down from the player's age band per Football Australia guidelines and starts the GRTP framework. Detail in Concussion and HIA.

If the coach takes a player off because of an injury, the substitution is in the match record with its minute — your injury record's onset matches it, which is what stands behind FNSW reporting later.

The habit that makes Monday easy: before you leave the ground (or that evening), create an injury for anything you assessed as more than a knock — severity, expected return, referral plan can be filled in later from the injury detail. A family may also report the injury from their app overnight; that lands in Pending Review already marked unavailable, and you triage it as usual (the lifecycle answer).

Everything you log becomes part of the player's medical history. Be brief but specific in notes. "Twisted left ankle in 50/50 challenge with #7, walked off, full ROM" is more useful in two weeks than "ankle injury".